Enterprises increasingly rely on business process models to systematically describe business operations. Enterprises develop business process models to create, organize, and implement business plans that solve problems or exploit business opportunities. A business process model typically defines the ways in which operations are carried out to accomplish the intended objectives of an enterprise.
Business performance monitoring and management creates a window into an enterprise and allows the performance of the enterprise to be monitored. The monitoring of business processes typically encompasses the tracking of one or more individual processes, so that process state information, including performance statistics, can be collected and reported. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), for example, are indicators that allow an enterprise to achieve organizational goals through the definition and measurement of progress. KPIs and other performance statistics can be monitored and compared to predefined criteria to trigger alerts, when needed, for situations requiring attention. For example, the tracking of a customer order allows the state of the order to be determined so that problems can be identified and corrected.
Business processes and the corresponding monitoring models are typically complex systems that require significant enterprise-level effort to generate and maintain. In addition, a unique business process and corresponding monitoring model are typically created for each problem. While there may be one or more existing business processes and/or corresponding monitoring models that could be leveraged in the creation of a new business process and/or monitoring model, there is currently no systematic way to describe existing business processes and/or corresponding monitoring models or to search for existing business processes and/or corresponding monitoring models.
Thus, there is a significant need for a mechanism for systematically describing existing business processes and/or corresponding monitoring models. In addition, a further need exists for a mechanism for searching for existing business processes and/or corresponding monitoring models.